Saturday, November 25, 2017

Putin is Destroying Last Vestiges of Russian Federalism, and Russians Aren't Yet Resisting

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 24 – Vladimir
Putin’s centralization of power combined with the mobilization of ethnic
Russians who believe that the existing federal system puts them at a
disadvantage and thus must be changed is rapidly changing Russia away from the federal
principles that the 1993 Constitution calls for.

“All freedoms and
rights are being restricted,” Kevorkova says; and “it would thus be strange” if
this didn’t affect the republics as well. Most regions think they have no
choice but to go along. However, “protests of a stormy kind always arise
somewhere other than where they are predicted” and so things may change quite
unexpectedly.

Kurban agrees. He says that “political
freedoms are being curtailed not only of the national republics but of all
others. Political analysts call the existing model [in Russia] preventive
democracy,” where formal powers are rapidly being hollowed out and rendered
meaningless.

The Kremlin’s appointment of
outsiders as governors is especially dangerous for the future of federalism
because such people have little or no loyalty to the region or republic they
oversee but instead look only to Moscow, Kurbanov says. This has happened not
only in Daghestan but in Udmurtia, Novgorod, and Novosibirsk so Russians are
losing out too.

This policy, he continues, “allows
the Kremlin to suppress the pretentions of the regions for uniqueness and for
the preservation of a certain real or invented autonomy from the center even
about insignificant issues.The residents
of the country like the residents of the Caucasus are infected with political
apathy.”

According to Kurbanov, “the majority
of the population is prepared to allow the authorities to limit their political
freedoms in exchange for stability” and the avoidance of the problems of “‘the
wild 1990s.’ Moscow sees this willingness of the population to go alone and considers
that this resource of Russian tolerance has not yet been completely exhausted.”